Top 4 Ways to Promote Your Conference

by Osman Sheikh on Jul 5, 2013

Good promotion is a necessary part of planning a great conference. With so
many conferences being held, you have to promote your conference well in order
to attract attendees. People need to know about your conference in order to
attend, and promotion ensures that people interested in your conference are
exposed to it. Here are 4 great ways to promote your next conference.

Use Social Media

Promoting your conference using social media is a no-brainer. Social media
allows you to communicate with people who would be interested in your
conference with ease. Even if your conference is small and locally based,
social media is a valuable tool. Twitter and Facebook allow you to share your
location when posting. This will help you promote your conference locally.

In order to promote your conference with social media effectively, you need to
optimize for sharing. That means ensuring that your ticket registration page
and schedule can be shared easily. Your conference registration page should
not be overly complicated and should have a good amount of information. Long
and complicated registration pages hurt your ticket sales. If a potential
attendee stumbles upon your ticket registration, you want them to know exactly
what the conference is about.

Many conferences choose to use hashtags to promote their event. This is
another great tool that you should be using. Hashtags not only help promote
your conference but they help attendees network and share with each other even
after the conference is over. Good conference hashtags are short and include
the conference year. Remember, people only have 140 characters, and your
hashtag should be only a small part of that.

Another new and exciting addition to the social media line up is Lanyrd, a
social conference directory. Adding your conference to Lanyrd is absolutely
necessary. The earlier you sign up, the better. With Lanyrd, potential
attendees can discover your conference and other conferences relevant to their
interests. People looking for conferences to attend can browse by topic and
location.

Start Early

Start planning and promoting your conference as early as you can. This gives
attendees more exposure to your conference and more time to prepare for
it. When you start early, you can sell early bird tickets at a discount to
encourage more registrations. Starting early also gives you more time to build
a social media presence and plan the best conference possible.

Blog

Blogging is a great way to keep people updated on your conference. You should
blog about your conference and about the industry. If you’re planning a
conference on education, it is a good idea to share news on education
technology and blog on how you’re planning your conference. Did a new speaker
commit to your conference? Blog about it.

Having a blog is also valuable for social media. Every time your blog post is
shared via Twitter or Facebook, your conference is promoted. Blogging can also
help increase the search engine visibility of your conference. When someone
searches for a conference on a specific topic, you want them to see your event
website. This will help increase attendance at your event.

Leverage Your Sponsors

Most conference planners know that allowing companies to sponsor your event
will give you a larger budget, but the promotional benefits of a sponsorship
are often overlooked. When a company or organization sponsors you, their
success is tied to your success, and they will do whatever they can to help
promote your event. Most sponsors will actively promote your event on their
social media pages. If one of your sponsors is not doing this, chances are
they will gladly do so if you ask them to. The larger your event is, the more
promotion your sponsors get.